A potentially important tool in recognizing and taking immediate action in dealing with brain trauma is available to NFL teams, but most have chosen not to use it.
The CereTom, a portable, cordless scanner developed by Massachusetts-based NeuroLogica Corporation, already has been used to diagnose athletes at athletic venues such as championship boxing matches and the Indianapolis 500. However, the Indianapolis Colts and Oakland Raiders are the only pro football teams using it on their sidelines this year.
“I don’t want to sell medicine to teams that don’t want to swallow it,” Eric Bailey, NeuroLogica’s CEO, said, adding that there are at least two more teams considering purchasing the machine. “We’ve talked with the league; this is a new area for them. I think they ought to be able to test-drive something before they buy it. The thinking is to get two or three teams to try it this season. The league can then see if it’s effective medicine, and then they can make a decision as to whether to take it league-wide.”
Approximately 4 feet tall and about 30 inches wide, each CereTom costs approximately $300,000 and is, Bailey admits, part of a different application of medicine – the emerging tele-medicine field.
For games at Oakland, if a player takes a big hit, he can be scanned by the CereTom, a process that takes less than a minute. At the same time, a radiologist, or trauma specialist at the Alta-Bates Medical Center, not far from the McAfee Coliseum, will examine the images from the scan and prescribe a course of action.
According to Bailey, during this spring’s Indy 500, he looked at the scan of one of the drivers while sitting in his home in New Hampshire.
The immediacy of the scan can be crucial in treating athletes, Bailey said, citing the undercard of the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather boxing match earlier this year. One of the fighters, Lorenzo Bethea, lost a lopsided decision. Examined ringside, Bethea knew who he was and where he was, and answered a few other questions correctly.
“Normally, he would have walked right out the door,” Bailey said. However, in this case, he was given a brain scan with the CereTom, where bleeding in the brain was discovered.
“He could have gotten up the next day and decided to go spar with someone. He could have really jarred his head and rattled his brain by stopping hard at a red light on his way home,” Bailey said. “He could have fallen asleep that night and never woken up. I’d like to think we had something to do with possibly saving his life.”
